The Myths and Realities of Enterprise Content Management
Through the years there has been much talk around the value of an ECM system. There has also been much confusion. EMC breaks down the six myths of ECM to bring you the realities:
Myth #1: ECM systems are only for large enterprises. We can get by with email and shared folders to do our work.
Reality: Organizations and departments large and small can benefit from easy ways to organize, store, publish and archive all types of electronic information. With an ECM system in place, you can share the content you need to do your jobs and also access your business applications. An ECM system stops you from reinventing the wheel, saving time and money.
Recommendation: An ECM system should function as part of your familiar desktop environment. The ECM system ensures that you find and modify only the content that you are authorized to access. You can seamlessly connect to your back-office applications and find the business information you need to do your work. Today, this kind of interactive environment is both affordable and easy to maintain and the underlying technologies are readily available.
Myth #2: We do not see the need for an ECM system since we rely on business applications to do our work.
Reality: Regardless of the business application environment you live in and use everyday, you frequently need to find unstructured information. It’s critical to integrate your ECM system into your enterprise infrastructure.
Recommendation: An ECM system should manage various types of business documents and have the ability to be integrated into business processes. You must have the ability to find relevant documents while continuing to work within your line-of-business application. The end result is a complete environment that blends structured with unstructured information. You can concentrate on your immediate tasks at hand, work within your structured application environment and also have the flexibility to quickly and easily find unstructured information.
Myth #3: All we need for running our business is a place where we can file our documents electronically.
Reality: Basic content services and a search engine provide only some of the capabilities for effectively managing unstructured information within your organization. There is more to content management than storing and searching for information within a department. An enterprise solution transcends departmental boundaries and addresses the needs of the entire organization.
Recommendation: First decide whether or not basic content services provide the right tools for your business needs. In some instances collaboration, check-in/check-out, and versioning will get the job done. If you are looking at moving away from operational stovepipes, then an ECM system that includes capabilities to capture, store, secure, categorize, distribute and archive content across your organization—regardless of where the information originates, how it is indexed and published or when it is archived—might be the better solution.
Myth #4: An ECM system is too monolithic and cannot adapt to our changing needs.
Reality: ECM systems provide an adaptable and flexible environment for sharing all kinds of business information.
Recommendation: Use an ECM system to manage content in a flexible fashion, optimized for your group’s collaborative tasks—a shared resource, accessible to all team members, regardless of locale. The shared information is controlled, managed and protected according to predefined policies and procedures. By building on the capabilities of an ECM system, your shared workspace meets your company’s compliance requirements for governance and information lifecycle management. This reduces the risk that team members will inadvertently expose sensitive information.
Myth #5: An ECM system is just about capturing, storing, managing and publishing content.
Reality: There is more to an ECM system than simply managing content within a repository. The stored content must be searchable, actionable and available to solve business problems, and able to demonstrate compliance with relevant regulations and policies.
Recommendation: As you capture and store content, you have to be concerned about how you have indexed your enterprise information in the first place. Define your key content categories up front and understand how these criteria relate to your business tasks, processes and results. Begin by identifying the relevant sets of terms you use to run your business. Ideally you should be able to categorize your content on the fly, in the context of doing your work. Use templates to automatically embed appropriate tags and link terms to business operations to eliminate manual content tagging. Once information is stored within a repository, you can implement policies and procedures to archive content, manage predefined types of content as records and ensure compliance with regulations and operating procedures.
Myth #6: We cannot possibly convert all of our content to a digital format.
Reality: In today’s digital economy, you really do not have a choice. If you’re going to maintain your business and build relationships with customers, partners and suppliers in a cost-effective fashion, you need to make the transition to electronic business operations.
Recommendation: Consider a phased approach. It is best to get started by transforming a few critical business processes and then building on your successes. Along the way, you should audit your paper-based files and determine what items need to be converted to support these new processes. It is important to leverage a content-enabled solution framework that is designed to power a class of similar business processes. A solution framework speeds and simplifies application development and deployment, which in turn optimizes your costs and investment. Application developers can quickly build content-enabled applications using pre-built components. A solution framework enables content reuse and connectivity between business processes.
EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is a leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to transform the way they compete and create value from their information. Information about EMC’s products and services can be found at
www.EMC.com.
To learn more about enterprise content management solutions from EMC, visit www.emc.com or call 800-607-9546 (outside the US: 1-925-600-5802).